Regardless of if you are a trying to start your very first e-commerce store or if you’re a veteran entrepreneur, using Shopify is one of the best ways to reach your customer in the online world.
In this article, we will briefly look at the ins and outs of Shopify, and then I will list the best apps available for Shopify.
As your idea of your store is birthed, and slowly refines itself, you must not question yourself or worry if it can be knit into reality. Shopify fully supports your store, regardless of if you’re selling goods like merchandise or T-Shirts, or aim to provide your customers with services.
It is also assuring to know the fact that Shopify is recognized as a suitable e-commerce solution by huge brands and small businesses alike. It is also known to cater to a broad range of industries.
So, if you’re setting up shop on the internet for the first time, Shopify is definitely one of the easiest e-commerce builders out there that will help you run your online store by making the process straightforward and painless.
Regardless of if what you’re selling is a physical product, a digital product or a drop-shipping product, you can sell it on Shopify. As long as the products you sell are in abidance with the law, you’re good to go!
If you want to see the variety of different and unique businesses online leveraging the resources provided by Shopify, navigate the site and click on the “E-commerce by Industry”,
option.
Here you will find a listing of the most popular and unique businesses that use Shopify as their platform to reach their consumers. These businesses range all the way from coffee beans to homeware.
It truly is hard to find something you can’t sell!
This is why talented entrepreneurs love Shopify, since it opens up avenues, and does so in ways that push their businesses ahead of the curve.
The 10 Best Shopify Apps to Boost Sales ( Updated : 2019 )
1. Product Review:
The Product Reviews app enables the customers to leave reviews on your products. This is a great way for you as an entrepreneur to receive feedback and hence point your business in a better direction if something isn’t working out. Product reviews are more important than you think. Consider this – only 2% of customers that buy things online DON’T look at the reviews. So, in a way, having product reviews opens up new avenues for business, since better reviews will make you a trusted seller in the eyes of a new customer.
Also, content that is published in the customer reviews tunes your site’s SEO for the better.
2. Order Printer:
Making a unique invoice for your customers can be a hassle. This is where the Order Printer comes in. Order Printer allows you to swiftly and painlessly print invoices and receipts and also helps create labels and packing slips.
You can create templates that will suit your business’s carry, and print them in bulk if you wish to speed up the process. You can also customize the branding on the material that you print freely, this will streamline your site’s branding and create a cohesive and consistent experience for customers.
3. Kit:
One of the most important, if not the most important factor that defines the success of a business, online or offline, is its ability to pull new customers. Post launching your store using Shopify, the very next step you should be focused on is driving traffic to it. There are many ways to do this, a popular one being by using digital marketing. But, if marketing is not your forte, or you just want to leave the marketing part to someone who knows better, Kit can definitely pull the weight for you.
The kit will help you run Facebook ads and email marketing campaigns and also deliver performance updates. All this is done by harnessing artificial intelligence, and this will help consumers find your business via Facebook and Instagram by sending them targeted messages at the right moment. The best part is – it even works when you sleep.
4. Benchmark Hero:
It is important to understand that SEO improves your website’s searchability. If your website is on the first page of Google or Bing, or whatever the customer is using, it means that the search engine has declared your website as a reliable one. To optimize your e-commerce store properly for Search Engines can be difficult since you don’t quite know what part of your website could be less optimized. Benchmark Hero app reports to you with a detailed analysis of your site, and lets you know what’s working and what’s not in terms of optimization, as it relates to search and your store’s performance.
5. Klaviyo:
Klaviyo is a marketing automation software that can be connected to your Shopify store. Using Klaviyo, you can automate email sequences and target campaigns based on your customer’s buying behavior. Also, you can get detailed customer data and use it to feed your overall business strategy. The best part of all, it was built with keeping the nature of e-commerce in mind.
It is free-to-use up to 200 subscribers and 500 email sends, which makes it great for stores that are just getting started.
6. Digital Downloads:
Digital Downloads is undoubtedly one of the best free Shopify apps. This easy-to-use app allows you to sell digital products on your Shopify store. Regardless of if you’re selling music or product codes for software, this app will do the job perfectly. Customers can access content instantly and updates are forwarded automatically to customers.
7. PushOwl:
Do you succeed at attracting customers but they just fill their cart and leave?
This is normal, and statistics show that more than 68% of online shopping carts are abandoned. There’s no need to worry, PushOwl is an app that will help fix this. When a customer abandons a cart, push notifications can help you increase sales by re-engaging customers and bringing them to your site again.
8. Bulk Image Edit:
Every search engine out there has one thing in common. They look at the image size and the relevance of the image to your site. On this basis, they rank your site on the first page if you check all the right boxes. In other words, if you have images that are large in size and are not tagged with proper keywords, it is detrimental to your SEO ranking. This is where the Bulk Image Edit app is useful.
The app will help decrease the size of images across your store, which will in turn decrease page load time. It will also adjust tags and file names on your site to better optimize your page for search engines.
9. Tidio Live Chat:
If your site has live chat, the customer is more likely to shop on your site because it makes it clear to the customer that your site has support readily available. This increases the reliability of your site. Even if a customer just checks out your site, they are likely to return because the site seems trustworthy.
You can take harness the power of live chat using the Tidio Live Chat app. They provide Chatbots (up to 100 automation events on the free plan) and you are to set up automated messages to answer common queries. This will help capture more sales since support is literally available 24/7.
10. Oberlo
A well known app and probably the biggest name in dropshipping.
Oberlo lets you sync products from aliexpress to your store while changing the crucial details like pictures, text, and pricing.
It’s a must-to-have tool for anyone who’s dropshipping from aliexpress. They also have a fantasic blog where they share jaw dropping articles about growing a shopify store. Even if you don’t get their app, you can learn a lot from their blog.
Finding Shopify Apps in 2019
Here’s some more good news for you.
if you already own a physical store and want to make your presence felt online as well, you can upload and manage your entire inventory online, in one location, with Shopify’s Point of Sale (POS) system.
And another thing – Shopify’s pricing system is very supportive of small business and provides reasonable plans to large corporations. Shopify truly allows businesses of all sizes to leverage the platform to grow their business and reach their customers.
Shopify’s Pricing :
The plans are as follows:
Lite – $9 a month
Basic – $29 a month
Professional – $79 a month
Unlimited – $179 a month
Shopify Plus – starting $995 per month
All of these plans include features like unlimited product uploads and unlimited file storage, and they have superb 24/7 online and phone support. Also, you are not charged any bandwidth fees or transaction fees when you use Shopify payments to accept payments from customers. There are no ‘setup fees’ or any hidden charges as such.
Every plan also includes an extensive selection of website templates and apps from the Shopify store. There are both free and paid alternatives available in both the templates and apps.
All Shopify plans are monthly ones unless you opt for an annual or biennial plan. You are also welcome to upgrade, downgrade or cancel Shopify at any time.
Although, none of the plans include hosting or domain name services, and this is something you will have to look to get outside of Shopify.
Obviously, Shopify is not the only e-commerce store-builder on the block, there are other options available too, like BigCommerce and Volusion just to name a few. If you wish to compare these services and want to see which one offers better value for money and weigh up features, Shopify helps you do this too. The best part is that their comparison system is unconventional, but simpler to navigate. By this I mean they don’t use the traditional comparison charts. Instead, when you look under the “Comparisons” section on the Shopify site, they have testimonials from users who have moved to Shopify from as many as 20 other platforms and services including BigCommerce and Amazon Webstore.
One of the biggest downsides of not picking Shopify is that other options do not offer a Point Of Sale system, which allows businesses that also have physical stores to synchronize both their online and offline sales.
Best Shopify Apps with the features and functionality:
As I mentioned before, Shopify has hundreds of free and premium apps that you can utilize to enhance the functionality of your e-commerce store. To help you find what you need, the apps on Shopify have been classified into the following categories –
Accounting — You are welcome to connect your Shopify store to a wide variety of accounting apps if you use them. This includes apps like Quickbooks and Freshbooks.
Customer Service — This category contains apps that will allow you to add features like contact forms and live chat to your online store.
Inventory — Apps under this category allow you to incorporate inventory management systems to your store.
Marketing — Apps that allow you to showcase your products as advertising come under this category.
Reporting — Apps under this category enable you to get additional analytics for your online business by measuring customer behavior and sales data.
Sales — They help increase sales using customer loyalty programs, product reviews, and recommendations.
Shipping — These apps make product shipment easier by connecting you with your preferred shipping service.
Social Media — These apps enable you to engage your customer better.
Tools — Here, you will find tools that help with aspects of your online store like fighting fraud, and syncing your blog RSS feeds.
I understand if you think optimizing your site and adding more functionality is a bit of a hassle, because it is. But it will definitely bump up sales on your store and help you push forth as a business person.
If you’re unsure where to start, I would suggest you start by SEO of your site. It is regarded as a basic need for your site and you should definitely look into optimizing your online store.
Once everything is set up, you must go through with launching your site. You must not be discouraged if things don’t work initially, as your site and business will always be a work in progress, and you must morph according to the trends in the market and online.